Workshop 3: Character Flaws in a Flat Arc
Avoiding a Mary Sue when rebuilding a character
One of the hardest things to do well with a flat arc, in my mind, is to create a character with believable flaws that don’t get addressed over the course of the story. Without flaws, you can end up with a holier-than-thou character whose sheer perceived perfection reads as a flaw. That’s basically the whole idea behind the Mary-Sue or Gary-Stu caricature. But conversely, too many flaws and we’d want to see them addressed in a change arc, not static in a flat arc.
So. How do we do that?
First, let’s look at K.M. Weiland’s notes on what a flat arc character needs in the first act.
A flat arc character might have a ghost, but they’ve already made peace with it. They live from a place of Truth and may not even be aware of the Lie that perpetuates the story world. A protagonist with a flat arc will be tested to continue to act from what she already knows in a world that denies that Truth.
So for a flat arc protagonist, their flaw does not inform their lie, because there is no internal lie that needs overcome. Instead, their character flaws might be evident in how the conflict between the Truth and the Lie is handled. Maybe they’re stubborn, or blunt, and their insistence on the Truth might jeopardize relationships with the people who are entrenched in the Lie.
I feel like this will work for the story I could tell with Adaya. So I’m going to switch from a theoretical focus here to exactly how it could play out in the flat arc I want to write for Accidental Notes.
Change 1: Don’t Enter Bend until the 25% Mark
In order to set up the world of the Lie better, I need to start the story earlier. Adaya and her mom need to embody the Truth of moving on, even if we don’t know what they’ve moved on from yet. We need to understand who she is in California, and how she fits there, so she becomes the fish out of water character in her adventure world — and thus the only person capable of saving it from being frozen.
Right now, we have some flashbacks to Adaya with her mother, to the moment she agrees to go to Bend for the funeral, and some jabs at her father in those flashbacks. If we open the story here, instead of seeing this in retrospect, we can hint at the Lie her father lives in, how her mother has helped her move past it, and how she now has tools her family does not. Again, we won’t know why her dad is the way he is, but we will see what’s possible on the other side for him because Adaya’s mother has accomplished it — and passed the truth down.
This will also give us a chance to see Adaya’s imperfections in a setting where they won’t be changing someone’s life.
Change 2: Adaya’s Flaw
When I’m writing a positive change arc, I usually look at how the character can get in her own way with her flaw. “What is a system of belief that used to work for her, but isn’t anymore, that she needs to learn how to shed?” Is that line of questioning. But with a flat arc, it isn’t Adaya who needs to change. It’s the world her dad lives in. So my question changes: “How can Adaya’s flaw work to force her family, specifically her father, to face the Truth she carries if only they could see it?”
Because Adaya is young — fifteen — and unfamiliar with her father’s complex grief of losing a child while managing to both deny it and refuse to move on from it, I actually think her youth, her naivete, will be important here. Children ask imprudent questions. They push. Teenagers lash out at a world they believe is unfair and should be fixed. Often, they’re right.
I think that suits her. It makes her imperfect and young and also the only hope to help a family move past their grief they’ve gotten stuck in.
Change 3: The Romance
Accidental Notes was never supposed to be a Romance in the genre sense. But I let Adaya’s arc originally rely on how Grayson changed her, when my workshopping the story, and my edit letter, have made it clear it needs to be a story about how Adaya changes her family. That means I need to rethink who Grayson is to her, and how they work together.
There are four choices in how to handle the romance:
- Grayson is also stuck somehow and Adaya’s Truth changes not only her family but Grayson as well.
- Grayson is an ally who also believes the Truth but hasn’t wanted to/been able to teach it to Adaya’s family, but together they can.
- Adaya has a subplot with a minor positive arc that Grayson is the catalyst for.
- I remove Grayson as a love interest entirely.
Three and four are out on principle, I think. The third choice is what I tried to do originally and it fell, well, flat. And there’s too much I can do with Grayson as a neighbor and with the idea of first love to simply drop him from the story. I think I’d lose complexity, and what matters to Adaya in her own life, if I did that.
What’s calling to me now is a version of the second option. Another thing Accidental Notes has been missing is stakes. And if Grayson and Adaya start a relatively uncomplicated relationship, or exploring the idea of one, perhaps the Lie and the world entrenched in it keep her from Grayson — that he is the stakes she could stand to lose if she fights her family too hard.
This is going to be a lot of rewriting — essentially from scratch, as so much of Adaya’s story revolved around the positive change arc, and I want to add an entire quarter to the story — but it’s feeling right in ways that it hadn’t before. It’s feeling cohesive.
Adaya and her mother have learned to move on from a tragedy her mother’s refused to name, but when Adaya must return to her father’s house for her grandmother’s funeral, she must confront the mystery that keeps her father living in the past, or risk the one relationship from her previous life she regretted leaving behind.
Maybe it’s not perfect, and not how it will play out exactly, but I no longer wonder how all the pieces fit, and that is a step I never thought I’d get to with this book.